CineNiche

  Welcome back to Retro Flashback. Today we have a special critique, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2. There are countless sites devoted to the Evil Dead series and rather than rehashing old material, I thought we could try to find ways to view this classic in a new way. We all know Ash to be a hero, but what is he fighting for? Is it possible that he is merely battling for his own sanity? We will also rate Dead By Dawn to see where it falls in your horror education. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.” Charles Dickens – David Copperfield     "Groovy!” Ashley “Ash” Williams In the beginning... Sam Raimi was born in 1959 in Fra...

Poster from Alamo Drafthouse Reviews and essays abound for Drew Goddard & Joss Whedon's Cabin In The Woods . Some compare Cabin to Scream while others are convinced that Cabin exceeds Scream as a post-modern text. We belong to the latter camp. If you haven't seen Cabin then you shouldn't be looking at reviews so long after the the film's release. In 1996 Wes Craven along with a brilliantly written script by Kevin Williamson breathed new life into the slasher film. They took all of the archetypical constructs of the slasher sub-genre and directly exposed them to the audiences while staying within the confines of the genre. This was not new, parodies had done this in the past, but Scream kept a straight face and managed to produce fear. Spoof and parody of horror has been around since the days of Abbot & Costello, but more direct to our discussion is the 1982 classic Student Bodies . Made in the midst of the early 80's slasher boom, Stu...

This may be the shortest review of any film on CineNiche, and it's out of spite.  Maybe not spite, but definitely to teach Jon Knautz a lesson.  We wanted to love Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer .  It had been sitting on the unwatched shelf for nine months, just waiting for that right moment to indulge in an Evil Dead type of horror comedy.  Finally, the day came - it was the right time - you know cosmos aligned and all that.  Final summation: This is the longest 85 minute film you will ever see.  It's not bad, far from it.  The main problem with Jack Brooks is they didn't have content to fill the running time so a lot of details that are not needed are included.  Here's a main example: Professor Gordon Crowly (Robert England) is possessed and ends up walking out his second story window and we cut to the next day.  Crowly wakes up with no clue how he got there and sees his hands are covered in dirt.  He turn...